“In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and poor people. Some hold, when hospitality died, she gave her last groan among the yeomen of Kent. And still at our yeoman’s table you shall have as many joints as dishes; no meat disguised with strange sauce; no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass, but solid, substantial food.
“He hath a great stroke in the making of a knight of the Shire. Good reason, for he makes a whole line in the subsidy book, where, whatsoever he is rated, he payeth without regret, not caring how much his purse be let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of the state.
“In his own country he is a main man on juries; where, if the Judge open his eyes on a matter of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in matters of fact.... Otherwise (though not mutinous in a jury) he cares not whom he displeaseth, so he pleaseth his own conscience.
“In a time of famine he is the Joseph of the country and keeps the poor from starving ... and to his poor neighbour abateth somewhat of the high price of the market. The neighbour gentry court him for his acquaintance, which either he modestly waveth, or thankfully accepteth, but in no way greedily desireth.
“In war, though he serveth on foot, he is ever mounted on a high spirit, as being a slave to none, and subject only to his own Prince. Innocence and independence make a brave spirit, whereas otherwise one must ask his leave to be valiant on whom one depends. Therefore if a state run up all to noblemen and gentlemen, so that the husbandmen be only mere labourers or cottagers (which one calls but 'housed beggars'), it may have good cavalry, but never good bands of foot.... Wherefore to make good infantry it requireth men bred not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner.”
The ancestors of the yeomanry had suffered much in the anarchy of the fifteenth century, when the violent ejection of freeholders seems to have become almost as common[81] as it had been in the evil days before the reforms of Henry II. But the Tudor monarchy had put an end to that nightmare of lawlessness, and in any society governed by law this body of small property-owners was bound to be a powerful element, even though they had no occasion for making any concerted use of their power, as during the greater part of our period they had not. One must not, of course, exaggerate their importance, or forget that, though a special dignity was attached by opinion to all freeholders, they included in reality men of various economic positions. Many of them must have been quite poor. In the eastern counties, where they are most numerous, they frequently own not more than three or four acres apiece, and can hardly, one would suppose, have supported themselves without working for wages in addition to tilling their holdings. Nevertheless the part which they played in the routine of rural life was an indispensable one, and the very diversity of the elements which they included made them a link between different ends of the social scale. It was from the more substantial among them that the government was most anxious to recruit the military forces. The obligation of serving the State as voters and upon juries fell upon the 40s. freeholders. The security of their tenure caused them to be the natural leaders of the peasantry in resisting pressure from above. No efforts of Elizabeth’s Government could induce the yeomanry of the North[82] Riding to abandon the old religion; and when tenants and lords fall out over common rights and enclosures, it is often the freeholders—though on occasion they enclose themselves—who speak[83] for the less independent classes and take the initiative in instituting legal proceedings. The upward movement which went on among this class in many parts of England meant a change in the distribution of material wealth which necessarily involved a corresponding change in the balance of social forces and in the control of political power. To Harrington,[84] who sought in the seventeenth century to find in economic causes an explanation of the revolution through which the country had passed, it seemed that the seeds of the civil war had been sown by the Tudor kings themselves in the care which they showed for the small proprietor. In destroying feudalism to establish the monarchy, they had raised a power which was more dangerous to the monarchy than feudalism itself. They had snapped the bond between landlord and tenant by the Statute of Retainers. They had given the tenant security by forbidding depopulation. Most important of all, by encouraging alienation they had caused an enormous transference of property from the upper to the middle and lower middle classes. “The lands in possession of the Nobility and Clergy of England till Henry VII. cannot be estimated to have over-balanced those held by the People less than four to one. Whereas, in our days, the Clergy being destroyed, the Lands in possession of the People over-balance those held by the Nobility at least nine in ten.” But property is political power individualised and made visible. The destruction of the monarchy was only the political expression of an economic change which had begun in the reign of Henry VII. “He suffered the balance to fall into the power of the people.... But the balance being in the People, the Commonwealth (though they do not see it) is already in the nature of them.” We need not accept Harrington’s view in its entirety in order to appreciate the significance of the change which he describes. Certainly the yeomanry were growing in political power, and were strong in that spirit of self-respect and pride in their order, which, when, as too often, it is confined to a single class, means social oppression, but which, when widely diffused throughout society, is the mother of public spirit and political virtue. The long discipline of tiresome public duties which they had borne throughout the Middle Ages had formed them into a body which was alive to political issues and conscious of political influence, and which, when participation in public affairs became not only a duty but a right, would use their power to press urgent petitions from one county after another upon the King and upon the Parliament, or by riding up from Buckinghamshire to protect Hampden at Westminster in 1642, or by fighting behind Cromwell in Cambridgeshire, or by fighting for the King in the West. Compared with the bulk of the population, they were a privileged class and stood by their own; it was they who restored the franchise to the 40s. freeholders in 1654 and refused to extend it to the copyholders. But the tenure of much of the land of England by men with whom, however poor, no landlord or employer could interfere, set a limit to the power of wealth, and made rural society at once more alert and more stubborn, a field where great ideas could grow and great causes find adherents. Political and religious idealism flourish bravely in a stony soil. What makes them droop is not poverty, but the withering shadow cast by complete economic dependence.
From such degrading subservience the freeholders, “slaves to none,” were secure. As it was, they often left substantial fortunes to their children, and by the middle of the sixteenth century were already following the examples of their social superiors in entailing[85] their lands. One can quite understand therefore that there is nothing inconsistent between the glowing accounts of their prosperity at the end of the century given by Harrison and his lamentation over the decline of the rural population, or between the well-attested sufferings of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century and his equally well-attested importance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth. The explanation is that the freeholders, though most important politically, did not form the larger proportion of those substantial yeomen whose decay was lamented. The day of their ruin was to come. But for the next two centuries they were safe enough, and, if anything, gained on the class immediately above them, whose lands they bought or leased, into whose families they married, and with whose children their own competed in the learned professions, laying, as the historian of Suffolk[86] said, “such strong, sure and deep foundations that from thence in time are derived many noble and worthy families.” Nothing in the life of the period caused more pride than the prosperity of this solid body of small property-owners, and the contrast which it offered to the downtrodden peasantry of the Continent. No loss has been sustained by the modern world greater than their disappearance.
(c) The Customary Tenants[ToC]
Important, however, as the freeholders were from a social and political standpoint, they were in most parts of England far inferior in point of numbers to those described as “customary tenants.” It is with the latter class that we are mainly concerned, and leaving the leaseholders on one side for examination later,[87] we may summarise shortly certain features in their position. The number of customary tenants varied from one manor to another, according to the extent to which in different districts farmers holding by lease had been substituted for them, and on some by the middle of the sixteenth century there were none at all. But there are many indications that, down to the end of that century at any rate, and probably much longer, they formed over the great part of England the bulk of the landholding population. Of the revenues of 74 manors held by monastic[88] houses in 1535, £116 came from free, and £1310 from customary, tenants. On 81 of the 118 manors analysed above they are the most numerous class. When all the different districts are grouped together, they amount to about 61 per cent. of all landholders, and even this figure does not give an adequate idea of their numerical importance. As we have seen, Norfolk and Suffolk are quite peculiar in the multitude of freeholders they embrace, while the large number of leaseholders on one extensive Lancashire manor unduly weights the figures for that county. On the Midland manors 62 per cent., in Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Somerset 77 per cent., in Northumberland 91 per cent. of all those holding land are customary tenants. No doubt the area of land held under lease was growing in the course of the sixteenth, and still more in the course of the seventeenth, century, and its growth is an extremely important movement, of which something will be said later. But it seems true to say that, down to the end of the sixteenth century, both in numbers and payments, though not in prestige and influence, the customary tenants, as distinct from the freeholders and leaseholders, were by far the most important class in the agricultural life of the country.
Among the customary tenants, however, there are certain important subdivisions. There are in the first place, differences of legal status. Though villeinage by blood had been disappearing rapidly for several generations, partly through manumission on payment of a fine to the lord, partly through the absorption of migrating villeins into the growing industries of the towns, a certain number of villeins by blood lingered on into the sixteenth century. Dr. Savine[89] has estimated that there were at least as many as 500 villein families in 1485, and as many as 250 in the reign of Elizabeth; and the fact that they occur occasionally on our Norfolk[90] manors, and rather more often on those in Wiltshire[91] and Somersetshire, suggests that his list could be considerably extended on further investigation. Even in 1561 a borough surrenders an apprentice on the ground that he is a runaway villein.[92] Even in 1568 it is worth while in leasing[93] a manor to a farmer for the lord to reserve to himself the villeins upon it, together with other forms of property like quarries and advowsons.